Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power by Dan Hurley

Author:Dan Hurley [Hurley, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780241964989
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-01-29T14:00:00+00:00

Over the days and weeks that followed, my performance slowly but steadily improved at boot camp and Lumosity, on N-back and the lute. My Lumosity score quickly jumped into the 60th percentile and continued creeping upward. Boot camp never felt any less awful, but my pace quickened, the nausea and light-headedness receded, and sometimes I could nearly keep up with Sarah, who was four months pregnant, and Cathy, who had just turned sixty. On the lute, I learned to play an early Renaissance piece that took up an entire page of musical notation, even as Michael kept emphasizing that it was more important to practice playing each phrase correctly, with the precise fingering indicated, no matter how slowly, than to rush forward: accuracy above all. It was so unlike the way I fooled around on the guitar, playing songs I’d learned as a teenager. The skill I was practicing now was not just playing the lute, but maintaining my own attention. My mind was the instrument.

On the N-back, within just a few days, 2-back magically became easier and I was soon able to reach 3-back regularly. My competitive instincts flaring, I started shouting to get myself pumped up between the twenty-item sequences. Laugh if you like, but I actually began imitating the voice of a preacher. “Reach up to touch heaven! Reach now, brother Daniel!” And when I finally did reach and remain at 3-back for a couple sequences in a row—then was promoted to 4-back a single time—I sang out, “I have been to the mountaintop!” But progress was in fits and starts. Sometimes my attention wandered, my performance worsened. And by far the biggest obstacle was just getting myself to sit down to do all the things on my list. After years of resisting routines, I couldn’t settle into one now, which of course meant that I often ended up reaching eleven at night without having completed my Lumosity or N-back exercises. But when I did, and spent an hour after dinner practicing the lute, it occurred to me: Isn’t this what smart people do? Perhaps an organized life goes hand in hand with an organized mind. Then again, if that’s true, why have so many brilliant artists, writers, and inventors been famous for living screwball existences?

Whatever the answer, my one failure with the brain-training regimen I had devised was mindfulness meditation. I did it about seven times over the course of a few weeks. I enjoyed its contrast with my other activities and with the rest of my life. It felt pure. I really wanted to keep doing it. The problem was that I had too many interviews to conduct, meetings to attend, papers to read, and people to meet. And I had seriously underestimated the true amount of time involved in all the other activities. Lumosity took nearly a half hour per day; N-back, about forty minutes; lute practice, another forty minutes, plus two and a half hours to drive to and from New York for my weekly lesson; and two full hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning for boot camp.

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